Archive for
March 24th, 2010

This article is the sixth in a series of in-depth stories related to the controversy surrounding the settlement of Quiet-Title litigation between the County of San Bernardino Flood Control District, County of San Bernardino, and Colonies Partners, L.P.

In this segment, we make available to you the 2006 Settlement Agreement between the Colonies Partners L.P., County of San Bernardino Flood Control District, and the County of San Bernardino.

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors announced Tuesday that it will not release confidential attorney-client information to prosecutors from the county’s four-year legal battle with Rancho Cucamonga developer Colonies Partners LP.

State and local prosecutors had asked the board to waive its attorney-client privilege so authorities can interview attorneys and examine documents from the case to determine if the controversial $102 million settlement with the developer in November 2006 was justified.

SAN BERNARDINO • Facing a $90 million budget gap, San Bernardino County supervisors on Tuesday canceled scheduled salary hikes for 560 employees to save $5 million in 2010-11.

“We are facing extremely difficult times and decisions,” County Administrative Officer Greg Devereaux said in a statement. “The board is taking actions that reflect real change in the way the county’s business is being managed. We cannot predict when the local economy will stabilize and unfortunately we’ve yet to see the full effects of the state’s financial difficulties.”

The state Assembly Public Safety Committee on Tuesday voted to advance proposed legislation that would provide San Bernardino County with additional grand juries to investigate local government.

Sponsored by Assemblyman Paul Cook, R-Yucca Valley, the legislation, if passed by the full legislature and signed by the Governor, would allow San Bernardino County’s presiding judge to impanel two grand juries solely to probe complaints about local government.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, saying she wants to stop the Legislature from acting like a “bill factory,” said Tuesday that she would create legislative teams to focus on her top priorities as governor and veto most other legislation.

Whitman has said she will concentrate almost exclusively on three areas as governor: creating jobs, cutting government spending and improving the state’s K-12 education system.

Republican billionaire Meg Whitman has attained front-runner status in the race to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger by spending nine times more than her nearest rival on broadcast ads in the first two and half months of this year.

The glossy production value of her campaign ads aside, her latest campaign finance report offers a peek at the woman who was a political unknown a short time ago, and perhaps provides some insight into how she might govern.

Two of California’s three GOP Senate candidates are talking explicitly about repealing the health care reform legislation. But Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, czar of the strategy/fundraising organization that helps get Republican Senate candidates elected, said Tuesday that they’re not going to push repealing the whole thing. Just the nastier bits.

Cornyn said his comments in the above link to the Huffington Pos were “misrepresented.” But the reason Cornyn’s comments matter — more than an inside-beisbol thing — is that if Republicans are going to wield the repeal hammer for the next six months, they will be more effective if everyone is swinging with the same amount of gusto.

Jerry Brown says he’ll take a careful look at whether California should join the 13 attorneys general who are filing lawsuits to stop the sweeping federal healthcare reform plan that was signed into law this week. But you don’t have to read very carefully between the lines in the statement Brown released Monday evening to see which way the California attorney general and Democratic gubernatorial candidate is leaning.

Brown says that of the attorneys general filing suit, “all but one are Republican” and that “healthcare is not the place, with people’s lives at stake, to engage in poisonous partisanship.”

Californians are more likely to support state budget cuts than they were two years ago, but reductions to parks and prisons are the only specific actions supported by a majority of voters, according to a new Field Poll.

With California government facing huge revenue drops driven by a sluggish economy, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers are looking at a variety of program cuts to close a deficit estimated at about $20 billion through June 30, 2011.